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Scripted by Waldo Salt from Nathaniel West's scalding 1930s Hollywood novel, John Schlesinger's lavish adaptation of The Day of the Locust (1975) is a wrenching, if imperfect, indictment of America's Tinseltown mindset. Recreating Golden Age Hollywood with seedy realism and film fantasy artificiality, Schlesinger and Salt punctuate the downward spiral of William Atherton's aspiring art director, Karen Black's talentless actress, and Donald Sutherland's wealthy rube with flashes of the decadent beauty, self-delusion, and killer ambition that render the film industry an irresistible snake pit. Though the characters played by Atherton and Sutherland remain frustratingly underdeveloped, the surreal climactic riot that engulfs them is a genuinely horrifying confluence of mob hysteria and visceral bloodshed that unstintingly reveals the depths of media culture insanity. A box-office disappointment that earned only mixed reviews, The Day of the Locust nonetheless garnered Oscar nominations for Conrad Hall's mistily golden cinematography and Burgess Meredith's bravura performance as a broken-down vaudevillian-turned-huckster.